The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  I had to reach Leviathan. I had to cast myself into her very jaws. That was my plan, and now you see how wretched a plan it was. I would give myself to her dreams just as Bain had wanted. I would make myself a thorn in her conscience. I would change her mind by becoming a part of it. In those unreal spaces, I would do battle with Bain and the others and turn aside Leviathan. And be her prisoner, forever and forever, as the stone grew over my wasting form.

  I told you Melory’s plan was better.

  I fell to my knees abruptly, there in the very heart of the battlefield. Illon hauled me up and I managed another few steps, but abruptly my breath would not come, and I doubled forwards and tried to vomit out the nothing in my stomach. My people formed a perimeter about me, but there were fewer and fewer, the stone-things jostling and grinding on all sides. Illon was shouting at me, and I was trying to shout at myself, all the voices in my head united in telling me I must get up.

  I got up, and then a stone-thing sheared through our group, knocking me over, scattering my people, crushing Graf, then wallowing off as though panicked. Before we could regroup, there were others filling the space it had made. They were not attacking us, exactly. We would have been dead in instants if they were. They were trying to find us, though, trying to bridge that gap in their minds that would turn us into enemies they could act against. I saw their shells tilt up, maws gaping, human faces blinking anxiously out to see what and where we were.

  A hand had one of my arms, a hand had the other. I was being jolted forwards, my legs trying to get numb feet beneath me to carry my weight. Illon had me; Amorket had me. Jalaino’s Champion met my gaze, her face taut with desperation; with joy. Amorket was trying to haul me to my death. Perhaps that satisfied her Furies. Amorket was trying to achieve her own death. Perhaps that, too, would suffice. Or she was trying to get herself close enough to Leviathan to give Melory’s plan a chance. Or all these things.

  We were past more stone-things. Leviathan filled all the world before us. My legs would not take my weight. I was like a dead thing myself, to be cast as an offering to appease the monster. And that, too, seemed fitting for the legend the Order had made about itself. Then a great shelled beast rushed into us and one of its legs lashed out and kicked Amorket in the chest and flung her aside.

  Illon shrieked and opened a long line across its flesh, and it recoiled, more from her than the knife. I found I could run after all, stumbling across the broken ground until I collapsed by Amorket, my moment of strength gone.

  Her fingers dug into my arms as she sat up. Her face was such an old friend to pain that I didn’t realise her leg was broken until I saw the crooked way it lay beneath her.

  Illon was with us a moment later, seeing all. She was shouting, but the blood was so loud in my ears I couldn’t hear her. A moment later she began striking Amorket, beating her fists against the knotted wood of the Champion’s armour, shaking her, screaming in her face, even swatting at the Furies as they came to investigate.

  Amorket stared at her, and because I was looking into her face, I saw the moment she relaxed. I saw the yes she had been denying herself since before she ever came to Orovo. She let the Furies off their leash and set them on Illon.

  And yet she must have held the very trailing edge of that leash, somehow. Or else it was Melory’s reprogramming, for Illon got up and sprinted towards Leviathan’s leading edge, that canted shell, that hungry mouth that could have swallowed the house I was born in. The Furies seethed in confusion, an angry cloud above me, before chasing her. They gave her time.

  You have heard stories where the youngest brother is the bravest one, the youngest sister the cleverest. We all have. Those junior siblings, who dare things their elders do not, who triumph against all odds and then return with bounty to their people.

  They are half-true, those stories.

  She vanished into the maw of Leviathan, and the Furies swarmed in after her, and none of them emerged again.

  Then the Order had caught up with us and were dragging me away. The villagers were in full retreat, the brackers also. We must flee or be abandoned and overwhelmed. They took me, despite anything I might have said. Because I was clutching her to me and would not let go, they took Amorket also.

  XI

  THE NEXT DAY, I had my strength again. Or enough of it to go see how things were, between us and the stone-things.

  Many of the Tsuno folk had died, and of Portruno, and of the brackers. But many meant that most were still alive, from all three forces. They had been fighting to give us time for our own mad plans, after all. Or the humans had, and brackers had struck, broken shells and then fallen back according to their own schemes, and so preserved as many of theirs as they could.

  Overnight, the stone-things had not overhauled our camp, and that gave Melory hope that some part of her plan had succeeded, and what she had taught the Furies had become part of Leviathan’s dream.

  I went without Amorket, who was one of many patients Melory and Tsuno’s doctor were tending to. I went with a couple of the Order who I’d told to abandon me and run if things went bad. But I went with hope and with my staff of office, and between their twin supports, I reached the battlefield.

  The stone-things were still there, forming their own camp of shells about Leviathan. I told my helpers to wait and went forth alone to meet them.

  They stirred uneasily as I came, those heavy shells. I saw them tilt and angle, and eyes glinted at me from beneath hoods of flesh and stone. I thought I heard the weak whisper of their human voices, one to another.

  I set my staff in the earth and they drew back from me, the edges of their shells scraping together.

  I took one more step, though I felt as if I should collapse there and then. Leviathan herself stirred and fell back before me. In her body were all the Furies that Amorket had hatched from her flesh, that bore the poison of Jalaino—not a venom for the flesh but one for the mind. If Melory had failed in her preparations, then perhaps the stone-things would have inherited only hate for us, and I would have been destroyed, and they would have followed the Order to the ends of the world in their need to obliterate us. And in that way, we might still, perhaps, have saved the villages. But Melory had spoken long hours with Amorket, and she understood the heart of Jalaino. Melory knew that village’s drive to fight us was rooted only in fear, which fear now lived in the dreams of Leviathan. We had become the monsters the stone-things warned their Children about.

  I held my staff up at the heights of Leviathan and she cowered, as a mountain might cower. She shuffled away from me. She picked up her shell and fled, in her ponderous manner, and the stone-things crowded in her churned wake and followed.

  * * *

  An epilogue, of sorts.

  A hundred days later, as the Tsuno folk say, meaning just . . . later, after the memories of the war with the stone-things had been given a chance to dull. I am standing at the outskirts of Jalaino. We are due a reckoning. My heart is very heavy.

  My people stand farther out, at the tree line, because this is my moment, and this is my risk to take.

  I can see Amorket, limping from the last of the houses, out into the fields where I’m waiting for her. Her tread seems heavy as my heart. Things have sat many different ways between us now, since she first confronted me in Orovo, but she is looking forward to this no more than I.

  Behind her, the people of Jalaino are gathered to watch. Among them are the other Champions, far too many of them, each tired and sick and bent under the weight of their ghosts. Each with the hives that feed on them even as they feed them, their wasps busying the air.

  She stops when she is still twenty paces from me, and her new Furies rise from within the twisted wooden armour. I hate the sound of them. They make me fear them, as though they were placing ghosts in my mind.

  “I am Handry of the Order of Cain!” I call out, loud enough that they can all hear me. “We have made our camp at the edge of your village! If you have beasts, we shall drive them away! If
you have word, we shall bear it! If you have outcasts, we shall claim them as our due! Now, what words have you for us?”

  I see her gather herself. “Only this, that you have outstayed your welcome! Begone!” Though I say so myself, she is not the speaker I am. Her voice is scratchy and thin, more a screech than anything else. Still, they hear her.

  “What if we will not?” I demand of her, of them all. “We have come to your door. We see your fires and your feasts and all the good things you have! What if we demand them?” And the people of Jalaino pull together, because this is their fear. This is what the tree learned from them, that it gave forth the Champions to defend them.

  “Then I drive you out!” Amorket shrieks, her voice breaking on the last word, and her Furies rush forth to swarm me, thickening the air, battering at me. I lift my arms, covering my face. I brace against the stings, even as I draw my robe about me and flee, a pitiful figure; a shadow gone back to the dark between trees. A nightmare woken from. I make myself a comic thing, yelling, cursing, diminishing; a thing they have power over. A thing not to be feared.

  It is as simple as that. Mostly because Melory has gone to Jalaino and spoken with the hive and the ghosts and done what she can to reprogram them. But this was their fear, and this was the need the Champions arose to satisfy. They wished to be safe from us, and now they have seen that they have power over us. They always had power over us, of course. We outcasts were only ever their victims, but they were too scared of us to realise it.

  I turn back, at the trees’ edge. Amorket stands, lopsided, slump-shouldered. Behind her, the crowd of villagers has changed, relaxed. The ghost that was their fear is no longer shining out of their faces.

  * * *

  How will things go with the stone-things? We have met them three times now, once again near Tsuno, twice elsewhere but in the same quarter. Each time one of the Order has stood before them, defied them, denied their ravening claim to the land, and they have fled before us. The bans that Melory placed within them through Amorket’s wasps have held. Problem solved, you would think, except life is not that simple.

  We must do something about the stone-things, by which I do not mean simply drive them away. They are the descendants of the ancestors, too. I remember those pale, toothless faces as they squinted out at us from their living houses that were also their prisons. I remember Bain’s grief when it could not feel the presence of its Children. They are not merely dreams of Leviathan, but humans who have grown up in a strange village, with strange customs and strange ghosts guiding them. If we can make a compact with the brackers, we can find a way to compact with them, too. Because they are our estranged siblings, and if anyone should have sympathy with the estranged, it is we of the Order.

  * * *

  I return to our camp, off in the woods, and we eat ship-food, and something that Iblis has let Melory grow in some of the fields Orovo no longer needs, from when it was bigger. It is something like the phenna we had in Aro, which you can cook or stew or grind for flour. It is sickly looking and tastes bad, and yet it feeds us, a little. We cannot live off it forever, but we can at least use it to supplement the food of the ancestors. Melory is still working on the problem, but these days she is talking about making ghosts, too. She wants a new ghost that we can carry with us, because there is only one of her. A Melory ghost, because what we saw within Leviathan showed us that such things can be done.

  That night, Amorket shuffles out to our fire and sits with me. Her armour is gone, and I can see all the angry pits and burrows on her bare shoulders and arms.

  “It worked,” she confirms. “The tree feels . . . safe now. The wasps . . . have stopped biting.” And Melory thinks the wasps will return once we do, that we can perform our song and dance at Jalaino, and after a day or so the tree will feel a build-up of our presence, and grow sick of us, and reawaken the Champion ghosts, just as a day or so of some berry or grain will make us outcasts grow sick from eating it. It will have a reaction to us, Melory says, and then Amorket or some other will come and we will speak the same sort of words, and she will drive us away. We have added to our rituals and our legends. Sooner or later, even those villagers with no Champions will have some villager chosen to don the ritual wooden armour they’ll make and drive us off when we have performed our chores and taken our due. And they will feel safer. And we will be safer, that much more entrenched in their world as the villains they can offload their evil onto and then drive out.

  Amorket leans into me and grips my hand. Words hang between us, not the ritual exchange but the real words we could not say there, and do not say now. I wish you didn’t have to go. I wish you could come with us. I wish . . .

  We went through a lot together, at Tsuno. I hated and feared her, and she bore a whole village’s hate and fear of me. But in the end, it was the two of us and Illon against the world, and Illon died. And I am a man who once imagined what it might be, to be with a woman, and unless and until Melory makes some breakthrough, I must never become close to any woman who bears the Mark of Cain. Nor would any woman of the villages tolerate my wooing. Save Amorket, who knows what it is like to be marked out.

  And now she returns to her people. And now I must depart with mine.

  “We will come back this way,” I tell her. In a hundred days, as the Tsuno folk say.

  “I will be waiting,” she replies. “I shall drive you into the darkness once again.” Her voice trembles, and I put my arm about her, and the words she does not say are but only when I have to.

  The next morning we are gone, leaving Jalaino’s dreams restful behind us, and Amorket to husband her loneliness, and me to bear mine until my feet carry me that way once more.

  Acknowledgments

  A huge thank-you to my agent, Simon, and to my editor, Lee, and everyone else at Tordotcom Publishing. Thanks also to everyone who enjoyed The Expert System’s Brother.

  About the Author

  © Kate Eshelby

  ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the epic science fiction blockbuster Children of Time. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British Fantasy Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award, and been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and the Brave New Words Award. In civilian life he is a gamer and amateur entomologist. He was a full-time lawyer until recently, when he decided to write full time, instead.

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  Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Guns of the Dawn

  Dogs of War

  Spiderlight

  Ironclads

  Cage of Souls

  Walking to Aldebaran

  Firewalkers

  The Doors of Eden

  Made Things

  THE CHILDREN OF TIME

  Children of Time

  Children of Ruin

  ECHOES OF THE FALL

  The Tiger and the Wolf

  The Bear and the Serpent

  The Hyena and the Hawk

  SHADOWS OF THE APT

  Empire in Black and Gold

  Dragonfly Falling

  Blood of the Mantis

  Salute the Dark

  The Scarab Path

  The Sea Watch

  Heirs of the Blade

  The Air War

  War Master’s Gate

  Seal of the Worm

  TALES OF THE APT

  Spoils of War

  A Time for Grief

  For Love of Distant Shores

  The Scent of Tears

  THE EXPERT SYSTEM’S BROTHER

  The Expert System’s Brother

  The Expert System’s Champion

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  Interlude

  VII

  Interlude

  VIII

  Interlude

  IX

  X

  XI

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE EXPERT SYSTEM’S CHAMPION

  Copyright © 2020 by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Raphael Lacoste

  Cover design by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Lee Harris

  A Tordotcom Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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  New York, NY 10271

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-250-76638-0 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-250-76639-7 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: January 2021

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